By that criteria there is no realistic training. As long as you “know” that you won’t be actually killing or wounding someone it might be good training but it isn’t real. You want to make it real go out and kill something keeping in mind the relevant laws and licensing requirements.

Probably the most effective way to find out how well trained you are is the false alarm. Until you determine how will react when you think it’s real you don’t how you will react when it is real. My experience has been mixed. It has ranged from total bumbling incompetence to ready to rumble. Hopefully, the ready to rumble me will show up when it counts.

What really seperates training from the real thing is the lack of a reset button. You are much more willing to do things when you know that the worst thing that will happen to you is a paint ball in the chest instead of a hunk of lead. The Navy found this out at the beginning of the Second World War when submarine commanders who were extremely aggressive in peacetime exercises suddenly became extremely cautious when they could get killed.

If I wanted it to get real I would choose Syria or Libya. Much more action there

tdiinva has it right: “What really seperates training from the real thing is the lack of a reset button. You are much more willing to do things when you know that the worst thing that will happen to you is a paint ball in the chest instead of a hunk of lead.”

That said, I do find force-on-force training to be very valuable. If done properly, its greatest benefit is that you get experience reading situations, determining best action, and reacting to threats. I find those that have done extensive FoF training read situates better, react faster and more dynamically.

What kind of training provides the best preparation? The kind that represents the situations that you are likely to find yourself in. For non law enforcement situations the best training is that which focus on identificaiton and evasion. There are two reason for this. One, if you can ID trouble and escape it you never get into a fight but equally important since you have to wait for an overt act by attacker evasion will at least buy time so you can get ready if the attacker decides to pursue. Blundering into a defensive situation come downs to can I shoot faster than the bad guy who already is a move ahead of me Neither police nor military style training is applicable to you in this situation. Learning aggressive tactics that you cannot use isn’t going to be helpful to you in a DGU.

1. You just describe the purpose of force on force training to the letter. Training people how to not just shoot indiscriminately at targets. You are put in a situation and you have I work yourself out of it, however you can. So, like I said I’m not understanding your point…

2. What aggressive things are being taught based on this video?

Shooting targets without shooting the wrong target? Discriminating between shoot and no shoot? That’s not aggressive, that logical.

I had a difficult time following these comments. I can’t object to the idea that training can be useful, nor that internet disses of particular programs are usually about as useful as the opposite bit, that “if you don’t take this course you’ll die!”

People used to gain skill (on a ranch, farm) with a gun or two, some shells, some targets, and a bit of imagination. A friend helps…she can set surprise targets and moving targets. Having a few actual enemies helps training immensely (ask an ex-prosecutor).

Today training for your nerves is free. Just park your car in a somewhat dangerous neighborhood and go for a short walk. Wear running shoes. Bring pepper and a gun. Don’t pick the worst neighborhood first. Don’t start with a walk in the dark. Have a friend keep your car running if you’ve got such a friend. I actually learned so much about self-defense by going to undergrad school in a ghetto where even yesterday and last week there were shootings and the smashing of faces with bricks a block from campus (North Philly). Those were perfect supplements to military training and shooting-war time. “Spot that Predator!” That’s the real training game, though you can actually lose. Adrenaline, it’s what’s for dinner.

RopingDown and CliffH are doing their very best to confirm every worst stereotype out there about FUDDS. Their attitude is, “I don’t need none of that there fancy-pants training and neither do you!” “Back in the day we just shot at a bunch of sticks and rocks on grandpa’s farm and we were ready for anything.”

Far too many of the yahoos running these “tactical” shooting courses are just that, yahoos. Defending them is just not a real good idea. There are so many of these CoD cowboys running around it is hard to keep them all straight.

Caveat Emptor. A bit of online research will save people from being ripped off by so called “operators” running firearms courses.

My criteria for a trainer is someone who’s actually been in a gun fight. I was fortunate enough to have served at a time where the men that trained me had seen action in ww2, Korea and vietnam. In at least 2 cases, all three.

I do not want an instructor who is all classroom and theory. I know nothing of the guy making the rant. Before I would accept his word as gospel I’d like to hear his bona fides.

I don’t want to sound bloodthirsty or anything, but IMO if they haven’t killed someone in the line of duty/war then I probably don’t find their info useful. Only way to be sure it actualy works.

Two acquaintances of mine taught me how to shoot in combat, neither were what you would call proffesional soldiers. One is an elderly man, another is a slightly younger man missing both legs. But both managed to kill so-called proffesional, trained soldiers. One with a Mauser in close quarters, the other one at longer range with an AK.

I am not an LEO or soldier, I can teach people to shoot but I can’t teach them to shoot in combat. Since there is an fundamental difference between those two.

Winning a gunfight does not mean your tactics and skills were good, it just means that your attacker’s were worse. Especially in war, opportunities exist to kill enemy without ever being in a one on one fight. Hitting someone with a rifle at distance does not make you a good personal defense instructor.

While I can see the advantage of a trainer who understands that bullets go both ways and one who has actually shot people on purpose, since I knew plenty of same who served in Viet Nam, we must keep in mind that we are training (hopefully) for everyday, unpredictable, stupid shit, not to fight the Viet Cong or Taliban.

IMO, it is important to watch these sorts of videos and even take some of the training, with the above caveat in mind, so you understand the theories at least of proper situational awareness, target acquisition under unusual circumstances, and legal responses to threats. Other than that the MOST important thing to train is to be totally and without question familiar with your tool. If you are confident that you can select the proper time to shoot and the proper person to shoot and you know that you can most likely hit what you shoot at you are probably 90% half way there. (joke)

Force on force is probably the closest we can come to simulating the chaos and adrenalin dump. That should probably be step four in training, but make sure they are giving you real world scenarios, not zero dark thirty raids on al Qaida strongholds.

I’ve a slightly different take on the “instructor must have experience” bit. I’m a bit more keen to exchange views with someone who has been under fire at reasonably close range, and had to act under those conditions, either to ‘shoot, move, communicate’ or just low-crawl to cover or to get the chopper off the ground, or get shots off to make an alley stop or to retreat. I think getting shot at a good bit provides a kind of self-knowledge and moderates the BS.

On the other hand, I’m a peacetime civilian, and have been for many years. I won’t be fighting any battles. I find myself admiring “technique in the small.” For example, many of you probably remember the video a month ago of the Chicago off-duty LEO approached at a gas station by three thugs, one with his pistol up: the LEO successfully drawing and taking out the pistol holder, whose buds immediately ran like hell.

The cop was right-handed. He bladed a bit to hide his move towards his strong-side holstered pistol. The admirable bit? With his left hand, as he was going for his pistol, he started patting his front and back pocket as if looking for something. It was nothing but a magician’s move, obviously grooved, and it worked, drawing the perp’s attention. Technique in the small. Who noticed that move? RF?

The FBI did a study (wish I had it on disk) of LEO one-on-one shootouts. It reached the conclusions that perps shoot better than most LEOs expect, and that the guy with his hand on his gun first, cop or perp, usually wins. Work it out so you (I) can get your hand on your gun discreetly, early. Technique in the small.

After watching that live fire training video of the russians it really changes the idea of a top tier trainer. To shoot a guy in the vest five times and then trust him to have a steady enough hand to shoot three shots a couple inches from your ear makes these rambo types on the gun range look like chumps.

In 1970 Vietnam was an excellent training facility for both long range shooting and hand-to-hand combat. The last guy that broke into my house found that out the hard way. He’s now serving 6 years in jail minus a leg.

Lol, knowing you’re not old and American, the usual phrase was either “keep f’g with me an’ I’ll tear your leg off at the high roll” or “keep f’g with me an’ I’ll tear your arm off and beat you over the head with it.” Military tropes are usually quite graphic.

Glad you ended that humanely, Hunter. The guy can get a college degree from his cell or learn how to make license plates. When I say, “shotgun, shoot the the guy in the leg if he’s thirty feet away with a knife”…they laugh it off. “Nah, carbine, kill him!” Finesse is apparently dead.

I spent part of 1970 and most of 1971 in Dong Ha (near Quang Tri) and Danang as a door gunner and then CE with the 173rd AHC, 11th Aviation Group (on loan from 12th Group), 1st Avn Brigade. But first I spent three months organizing medcaps out of Long Binh Plantation in the south as a “Civilian Affairs Co-ordinator”. That caused me to resolve that I never wanted my head to end up on a pole at a village entrance. I can laugh about it now. But still…. I won’t vacation in Puerto Vallarta.

I don’t get why people hate on Tactical Response so much for the camera man video.

Every gun owner should to come to understanding that you are going to come arcoss way more things that you do not want to shoot than things that you do want to shoot. And, the no shoot targets (i.e. people) might be right beside the shoot targets (i.e. BGs, also people.)

Family of four and the dog, three robbers break in one night, dad/mom grabs the old shotgun, three things dad/mom wants to poke holes in, five things dad/mom does not. That’s a 3/5 shoot-no shoot ratio.

Now, change that to concealed carry/open carry, out and about, and the ratio just got even more lopsided with no shoot targets.

“You better learn to communicate real well, because when you’re out there on the street, you’ll have to talk to a lot more people than you’ll have to shoot, or at least that’s the way I think it’s supposed to work.”
-Clint Smith

I am privy to a secret so deeply buried under layers of security that even Snowden probably didn’t get a copy: Top tier trainers aren’t hurting for work and don’t get in bitch fests. Their clients mostly wear uniforms or have Langley-printed fake IDs, and 1/4 of them will be dead before very long.

They can’t teach me to be twenty-five years old again, or give me gov’t approval to take “any necessary measure.” I’m just a suburban guy. My threats are small-time idiots.

The MOST important thing, guys, is to look at these videos and these trainers critically, as I discussed in my article here a few weeks ago. There is much valuable information to be gained from many of these professional trainers, especially those who have real-world gunfighting experience, so long as you are willing to review their information logically and decide for yourself what is useful and what is bullshit and what is dangerous.

I found this commentary about keyboard commandos shaking in their knickers over what MIGHT happen if they ever pull the trigger for real very interesting. As I told a friend once, “If you go to a lawyer and ask for marriage advice you will most likely get a divorce.” By the same token, if you ask a lawyer for concealed carry advice you will very likely decide not to do it.

If you do not feel confident in your ability to decide who should be shot, when, and that you are competent to take the shot, perhaps you should leave the EDC at home and carry you cell phone in that holster instead with 911 on speed dial.

Correct, but hard to define. My comment was based on number of students.

If training company A has 40 students that won gunfights, does that make it better than company B that had 10 students that won gunfights? What if company B did a better job of teaching how to avoid gun fights.? What if company B is located in a much safer location? Memphis vs Podunk AR? What if company B had 10 innocent students killed in street warfare and company A had no students killed? Does that mean company B sucks, or his students were outgunned?

Though I think Range Master probably holds the crown for the most civilian gun fights. But he has an advantage, being that Tom and most of his students are in Memphis.

I like James, and Jay they are both good guys, they both truly care about their students. I don’t agree with all of their methods and tactics, but they do have their reasons and will if they don’t tell you it, if asked their will provide an articulate reason about why they do things.

I know some of those folks, Paul. Hard core and competent, and I thank the stars that we have such men on our side, BUT…their mantra is, “Let’s go to stupid places where stupid people do stupid things and then shoot as many of them as we can!”

Considering SF is one type of SOF, you sir are correct. Yeager is nothing more than a load mouth pup who has never been in no holds all out fight. Chris Costa is fairly knowedgable but he seems to have bought into his own hype. Haley seems to be a pretty chill dude. I haven’t trained with these guys but that’s just because I have trained with others, and train regularly. As for practicing shooting around stuff you don’t want to hit I typically use balloons when I’m doing individual stuff. In addition to that ill set up random crap to move my feet around. There’s really a lot of good trainers out there. The only advice I can give is to always verify the trainers background. If some dude claims to be a SEAL, ranger and Delta shooter, then he’s full of shit, as everybody knows.

Actually, there are quite a few retired/discharged SEALs and Delta guys out there teaching. Vickers and Dufoor come to mind, but there are many others. What else do you do after a career soldiering?

I never took a course from such guys. I go drinking with three of them on occasion, friends from my late teens, but they don’t teach me anything except “leave before there’s a bar fight, because we’re too old for that now.” Which is good to remember.

For giggles, I just looked over their instructional cadre’s bios. For the most part their credentials consist of taking Yeager classes or somebody else’s classes, not any real-life experiences in combat.

I can not communicate my admiration of Paul enough, he is a GREAT american and soldier, but his classes offered nothing new, his drills were plain boring, and his teaching lacked inspiration. I have taken classes with far less “experienced” teachers who were far better instructors, ran much more interesting classes and generated excitement to succeed.

Being tactically proficient and being a good instructor are 2 entirely different things. Working well in a team in combat and being able to TEACH others how to do it are 2 entirely different things. Being able to lead a team in combat and teach men the needed skills for combat, those two things are inextricably intertwined. That is the skill level I would look for in an instructor/training program.

You show up with a paintball gun (Simunitions would be better) and the pinkslip for your car. During the “training” if you receive what would be a lethal hit you lose your car and have to give it to who shot you.

“If fear, doubt and hesitation has been bred into you, then being armed is probably not going to help you at all.”

Newbie here, I’m just shy of 2 years into 2ndA-RKBA thinking. Am I to understand that being indoctrinated into “fear, doubt, hesitation” (by living most of my 62 years in the south SF bay area), that I am better off by NOT being armed? I should let any attack come my way with NO response?

If you have come to the decision that being armed with a concealed weapon for self defense is a good and proper thing and you are willing to take the time to learn when and how to use it you may overcome your initial handicap. Maybe. It is definitely something you should be aware of and thinking about both while you are training and whenever you are carrying. Doubting your own ability to react properly and in a timely manner is very likely to get you killed. Hesitation is you enemy since once you have revealed your weapon you are the Bad Guy’s primary focus.

That statement assumes that “indoctrination” means you buy lock, stock and barrel into the value of that fear you were inundated in. If you think that living in fear sucks you haven’t been “indoctrinated” for the purposes of this context. If you think guns are worth being scared of more than criminals then you are the parties he’s referring to as I understand it.

You have already decided to go forward with owning and learning to correctly, and hopefully safely, use a firearm. Every time you pick it up you have to decide, again, that you ARE ready to use it. Its not a one time, admission covers all the rides, sort of thing. That is why so many trainers push the “muscle memory”, when it happens there is not any time for moral debates. Silent or otherwise.

I think what he meant was quite explicit. He was complaining about people who say “if I take your course and eventually have to shoot an attacker, they might see your training videos and my time at your course and try to argue that I wanted to shoot someone, was itching to.” Gibson considers you already intimidated and trained to feel ‘fear, intimidation, and doubt’: fear to train lest that be held against you even though it sensible and your right, intimidated from training for that same reason, doubt because you have been made to think you cannot make the right decision and will be convicted. It seems the clear point of his rant.

It pays to make a list, perhaps long, of the threats to which you would respond by drawing and shooting. Then get a copy of your state’s self-defense laws, preferably complete and with some case-law notes to fill out the picture. See how your list compares. Re-write your list. Training will pay, but the ability to be decisive pays enormously. What threats will you draw on? At what point will you pull the trigger? How many times? These seem simple. Then a crazed-sounding guy comes at you on a poorly lit city street mumbling an incoherent threat and holding something in his hand that you can’t quite see. What do you do. (case from the news here yesterday:) A gang of 15 year old girls, 5 or 6, surrounds you on a city street. One tries to grab your wallet. Another has something that turns out to be brick, and swings at your head. What did you decide to do and when did you do it? And so on….. It doesn’t take forever, and compliments skill drawing from concealment and getting off a pair quickly and accurately. Eventually shred the list. Since you asked. I’m the same age.

Scuse me for stating the obvious, Paul. You know nothing more about me and my associations than I do about you.

The very job description of Special Ops guys is to train to go to those sorts of places and to take out the enemy when they get there. While I was exercising a little humorous hyperbole, how does “Go to stupid places where stupid people are doing stupid things and shoot them” NOT describe what they are training to do? That was rhetorical, please do not respond as I would rather not get into a pissing match with all the “train with the elites” folks here.

As with all other training advice, review what I have to say and decide for yourself if it makes sense. Spec Ops training is for Spec Ops scenarios. The VAST majority of people who carry for self defense need to train for Quickie Mart robberies, muggings, or encounters with thugs on the street, not squad level assaults on enemy hard points.

These Spec Ops guys have my utmost admiration. I could not and would not do what they do, but how they train is not automatically transferable to civilian scenarios, or even to most civilians.

Paul,
I have trained at Sig Academy, Smith & Wesson Academy, Paul Howe, Tom Givens, Rob Pinicus, Claude Werner, Michael DeBethencourt, Gabe Suarez, Wes Doss and several others including Tactical Response. I have taken 3 classes at Tactical Response with 3 different instructors. Of all that classes that I have taken, the 3 at TR were the best. Time to get your head out of your ass.

The problem is, CliffH, that you have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to ASUSA and the training they provide to civilians. If you want to find out, let me know. Until then you are just posting nonsense.

Opinions are like assholes – everybody has one and sometimes they stink.

Instead of trolling the comments section and flaming people who disagree with you, perhaps you could write a full-length article stating your position, as I have several times, and submit it to RF for consideration?

And by the way, the comments under the articles I have had posted here have by a vast majority indicated that my opinions do NOT stink.

Did Yeager say some stupid stuff? Yup
Does TR offer great training? Yup

Downrange photog? Who cares? Your famed top tier instructors have shooters downrange when other shooters are firing behind them. Why? Because that’s what happens in real life. While YOU may never be allowed participate or even witness it, it happens matter of factly. And, yes, I have done it several times.

I get it, ASUSA was your first training class, thus you think they are great. I know that I still have a special place in my heart for Gunsite (my first formal shooting instruction), even though I realize how far behind the times some of their techniques are.

But they aren’t the end all be all in training. There are other people with different ideas. Some work well for civilian carry, some don’t. And that is just on the “tactical” side, once you get into pure shooting there are at least a dozen schools that I wouldn’t hesitate to send someone to go learn shooting from.

But you certainly don’t have the credentials to state your opinion with such binding authority. Heck I have a much longer and extensive shooting resume, and I wouldn’t even remotely consider my opinion about an instructor to be that binding.

PPGMD: How encouraging it is to read a moderate view untainted by the presumption that experience equates to infallibility. I noted in a PMc comment some weeks back that he had actually taken 16 courses with ASUSA. It may be 17 at this point? I assume either he is struggling to build cachet for the brand he bought so often, or that he gets a discount for interweb advocacy.

It strikes me that we are, as an interest group, at once both fortunate to have so many very decent defensive-shooting schools, and absurd if we debase every highlighting of one school with rants for or against another.

It’s been brought up before, but people talk about training this and training that. I just wish people would maybe try doing a pull up or a push up and maybe try and not be a tacti-cool fat ass and then pick up a a gun.

Heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure are going to kill most of the guys I see “training” at the range and at shooting courses long before a bullet does… Rant complete.

Yeager is a loud mouth, but bad press is still press, and we ALL know him, and the idea is to make money, right? Sounds like he is doing alright for himself even though I find standing on line 10 yards away and doing a mag dump on cardboard pretty asinine, but it’s your money and ammo, so go for it.

What a cold-water splash your comment is, coming after the “my ex-spec ops teacher is better than your maybe-not-even-ex-spec-ops-teacher” fun fest. In my limited experience if ‘spec ops’ means anything in the military, it means absolutely hard-core PT. I have no doubt that more time is spent running, humping packs, swimming, climbing, and crawling…than shooting. To the extent I have such friends my age, it’s their knees that are gone, not their shooting hands.

Had 16 weeks of army training and then more in Germany before going to Vietnam. With all that training,however, I learned more about survival and how to fight while spending some time caught in an L getting hammered by small arms, heavy guns and RPGs. Train hard because you might need it. Just keep in mind that training is never like the real thing.

Well, I can’t pretend to know how to evaluate someone’s operational experience as I don’t have any, but I can evaluate how good a teacher someone might be-

1. starting off criticizing your students, in a rant format, is not the most effective technique to address some legitimate concerns.

2. having to say it six different ways, overly wordy, rambling and confusing, even on the summary version, doesn’t inspire me as to how well you might instruct me on guns or tactics or anything else.

If you have something good to offer, just stick to teaching that. Getting in pissing contests on YouTube doesnt inspire me, and I dont see the “top tier trainers” are doing that.

In fact, the most experienced martial arts (and lately a couple of gun-fu) trainers I’ve met over the years have been humble, positive, to the point, and all suggested you can learn something from other trainers too, and weren’t threatened by it, as they too were constantly improving on their own art.

Yeager the Coward was tested downrange, failed miserably and good men died. He had no business going to Iraq in the first place, but wanted to try and get some cred to boost his joke of a training school, and in the end, it cost real men their lives.